Printable electronics has significant potential in application to the next generation of screens and displays for mobile phones and portable multi-media devices such as e-readers, where the demand for lightweight, ultra-thin, low cost and power efficient products is developing quickly.
The display market is presently valued at $130 billion and display manufacturers such as Panasonic, LG, Sony and Samsung are already intent on developing OTFT based display technology with the aim of shifting the competitive landscape towards more robust, lightweight higher performance displays.
Most flat screen display technologies consists of two main parts, the frontplane where the image is formed and a backplane to control the switching or flow of current to the frontplane pixels.
The challenge in realising this next generation of ultra-thin displays is the creation of truly flexible backplane technology such that the displays are robust and flexible enough to mechanically manage the thin form factor and so are shock proof and to some extent “unbreakable”.
A wide range of different frontplane technologies currently exist, each with their own benefits such as electrophoretic displays used in e-Paper or organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), all of which offer significant benefits over conventional display technology, such as lower energy consumption, better contrast, lower manufacturing costs, and material flexibility.
The requirements for the backplane performance remain the same regardless of the frontplane application. SmartKem's OSC’s will thus serve each frontplane technology as a backplane solution and will thus be frontplane agnostic. The development of OSC formulations and OTFT arrays and associated backplanes will enable the integration of backplane manufacture into a low temperature manufacturing processes suitable for low cost flexible substrates.
Smartkem’s high performance OSC materials will result in a performance shift in TFT backplane characteristics to meet the performance needs for driving the next generation of display front plane modes such as OLED, LCD and e-paper.
The display sector thus represents a key market for SmartKem where the superior performance and processability of SmartKem's OSC materials will allow superior OTFT based backplanes to be realised enabling manufacturers to benefit from all the inherent advantages of cost and performance with this new generation of display formats.